South Korean tech giant Samsung is reportedly in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in the AI start-up Mistral as part of a fundraising round that could value the group at roughly 20 billion euros (USD 22.81 billion).
As per the Financial Times (FT), Samsung could invest about 1 billion euro in the new round, adding that Swedish investor EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund is in talks to back the fundraising round.
The update comes a couple of months after Samsung’s April 2026 announcement of making strategic investments and acquisitions to accelerate development and commercialization in robotics, while combining partnering with local companies for technology development.
Mistral has already secured an investment commitment from Microsoft, with the tech giant agreeing to spend billions of dollars on the AI startup’s computing infrastructure in Europe under a deal that will also expand the distribution of the French venture’s technology through the American cloud and software giant.
The series of news involving Mistral is also coming at a time when Europe and the rest of the world are looking to reduce their dependence on American technology, amid the ever-evolving tariff warfare from the Donald Trump administration.
Mistral has established its position in the French military-industrial ecosystem, apart from positioning itself as a European alternative to US technology giants at a time as the region seeks more and more technological independence. Mistral has raised more than USD 3.5 billion in debt and equity to date. It last secured equity funding less than a year ago when it raised a 1.7 billion euro Series C led by Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML.
However, its valuation still remains dwarfed by American peers like Anthropic.
However, it senses a rare opportunity to outdo rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, with the Trump administration getting increasingly involved in terms of deciding who gets to access American AI models outside the United States.
Samsung, one of the largest producers of memory chips globally, has emerged as a crucial supplier of semiconductors that are essential for training and powering AI models. An investment from such a company would therefore provide Mistral with a significant strategic asset. In June 2026, Anthropic similarly announced a strategic investment from US memory maker Micron.